What on Earth is Going on? is a podcast for the curious, where small talk is banned and tangents are prized. Strap yourself in for genuine dialogues with people who think deeply and are ready to tackle the big questions, such as playwright Nicolas Billon, economist Miles Corak and chemist Cathleen Crudden.

On July 22 a lone gunman opened fire on pedestrians and crowded
restaurants on Danforth Avenue in the Greektown District of
Toronto. He killed two and wounded ten others before turning the
gun on himself. Three months earlier, just a subway ride away, a
man drove a rental van onto busy sidewalks, killing ten and
injuring 16. What is driving people, particularly young men, to
throw away their lives and those of others? Were these incidents of
terrorism or just mad acts of violence? What's the difference?

Ben heads to Toronto to speak with Joseph McQuade, a terrorism
expert at the Munk School of Global Affairs,
University of Toronto, to get to the bottom of these urgent
questions.

About the Guest

Joseph McQuade is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Asian
Institute’s Centre for South Asian Studies at the Munk School of
Global Affairs and Public Policy. He completed his Ph.D. at the
University of Cambridge as a Gates Scholar, with a
dissertation that examined the origins of terrorism in colonial
South Asia in international perspective. This research is currently
being revised into a book manuscript, tentatively titled
Anti-colonial nationalism and the birth of ‘terrorism’ in colonial
India, 1857-1947. His postdoctoral research at the University of
Toronto will interrogate the role of terrorism and insurgency in
defining national identity in postcolonial India and Burma
(Myanmar). His broader research and teaching interests include
critical genealogies of ‘terrorism’ as a political and legal
category, the global history of political violence, and the
relationship between insurgency and nation-states.

Categories

Archives

About the Podcast

Your weekly podcast for a world in flux.
Globalization and climate change. The rise of social media and the decline and fall of Blockbuster Video. AI and VR. Donald Trump and Flat Earthers. The world is changing so fast that we can't get a grip on how we got here, let alone where we're headed.
Join Ben Charland as he peels back the headlines to ask, what are the events, characters, forces and ideas that shape the human story today? Have things always been this nuts, or are they getting crazier by the day? Who were those barbarians that took down the Blockbuster Empire? Just what on Earth is going on?